"The System Is Good"

A veteran observer of political conventions, TIME Correspondent Hugh Sidey toured the convention floor at Miami Beach and offered these reflections on 1972's breed of Republicans:

THEY marched out of those ads that Henry Ford runs for his cars. They came from the families that Polaroid tells about at Christmas time, a little overweight and a little overhappy. They arrived in Hart, Schaffner & Marx, with burnt orange by Arrow. Their jaws seemed firmer, teeth bigger and whiter, complexions clearer, shoulders wider, backs straighter than the Democrats', and they had handshakes likes vises. Wandering across the convention floor was like strolling down Main Street with some side excursions up its suburban companion, Elm Street. There was the clean fragrance of Mennen's Skin Bracer and the soft clucks of mothers with their glasses hanging from chains around their necks.

Near midnight, after the deed had been done and Richard Nixon was the nominee and the programmed frenzy had died, a warm-faced woman in her 50s shuffled through the debris, turned to a stranger, and in a voice of housewifely distress, said, "My heavens, did you ever see such a mess in your life?" It was down home in Miami Beach with the folks who, it may be, really run America.

If there was sometimes narrowness or prejudice among them, it came from their own hard work and the belief handed down from Jefferson that America was to belong to the doers. They had their quota of moneybags, maybe more than the Democrats, but not that many more. They were well off, yes, but mostly by their own hands. Senator Bill Brock figured that among his 26 Tennesseans, no more than eight earned over $25,000 a year.

These people were chips from the national foundation, the part of the country that goes on by itself no matter who is President. They don't dig ditches or conceive the New Economics. They run the firms that build industrial plants and houses; they sell refrigerators, play pianos, bury the dead and straighten teeth.

Work was a theme in most conversations. It was, for these people, an answer to boredom, an elixir for unhappiness, a builder of slumping character and, of course, bank accounts. Surgeon John Sonneland left Spokane mulling over the double dilemma of reluctant kids and make-work jobs. Dr. Sonneland worked as a kid, worked in college, works now with great joy.

Karl Weaner, of Defiance, Ohio, boomed out Faith of Our Fathers at the Sunday morning church service. Something new at political conventions. He is a lawyer with twinkly eyes and a few race horses on the side, a man unabashedly moved when Frank Borman read from the book of Genesis just like he had from the moon.

Sameness was not an enemy in convention hall. Gilbert Carmichael, who sells Volkswagens in Meridian, Miss., bakes a potato and fries a steak out in the backyard under a big old magnolia tree most Saturday nights "just like everybody else," and Alvin Berg, from McClusky, N. Dak., an undertaker, reads the daily newspapers (no books) and uses his spare time to pursue the walleyed pike in Brush Lake just like so many of his neighbors.

They were no stars or heroes, but they like those kinds, and they liked to sit and gaze at Bart Starr and Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon. The homestead was still fundamental. A young student attached to the New Jersey delegation scratched his head and allowed as how he could not think of a single one of the 80 delegates and alternates who did not live in a house with a yard.

The women seemed sharper than the men, quicker to comprehend, more sensitive, even tougher, and the kids seemed more like kids than some adolescent activists, having been granted a childhood of Little League and 4-H and a few more years in which to enjoy it. Silver-haired Carlos Cortes, a Kansas City contractor who builds factories, looked across the floor, a giant sunflower badge bursting on his chest. He told about his life, a Mexican American who had wandered from the West and found his niche in the prairies. In a few days he will get another silver antelope from the Boy Scouts, whom he has served for 27 years. "I want to see others achieve what I have," he said. "The opportunity is here. The system is good. I'm sold on it. But everybody has got to learn that they've got to give something in order to get something."

Cortes' view still holds for most Americans. But there is as we near our 200th birthday a larger truth. Millions of citizens have been excluded from the system through no lack of desire or energy on their part. It might be well if all those Republicans down on the convention floor, who do so much to set the pattern of American life, were to find a deeper understanding of that human problem.

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